This invention relates to sorting and aligning elongated articles as they are being advanced along a conveying path (direction of article feed). The articles may be, for example, candy bars which are being advanced to a wrapping machine.
In order to avoid operational disturbances during wrapping, it is important that no articles are fed into the wrapping machine which are too short (for example, broken articles) or which are not oriented perpendicularly to the direction of article feed.
Heretofore, as a rule, a worker was assigned the task to properly align the obliquely oriented articles and to manually remove rejects. With the increased productivity of wrapping machines, not only has this manual task become more and more difficult to perform, but also malfunctions, caused by a faulty article, have become more frequent.